Hills End (23 page)

How was Miss Godwin? They didn't know. She hadn't moved except when they had jolted her, or slipped, or stumbled. They had done very well, those children, to negotiate the slope without an accident, and each one had struggled on past his or her normal strength, even Harvey.

They rested, breathing deeply, constantly aware of the pale face of their teacher, dreading the thought of lifting the table and battling on again, aware too, of desolation and solitude.

That each one was jumpy was obvious to the others, and Gussie was thinking about her desert island again, thinking what a stupid idea it had been, thinking of the stories she had read in which children had rejoiced to be alone for days on end, thinking of all the things she had imagined that one could do without grown-ups hanging round to spoil the fun. It didn't work out that way. This was a continual fight. She had never imagined that one would have to be brave. She had thought it would be nothing but fun.

One didn't realize how wonderful parents were, even though they were crabby at times, until they weren't there.

Perhaps they all sensed that something was wrong. Suddenly they were looking at each other, from face to face, nervously alert.

‘Is it a snake?' whispered Harvey.

They ignored him.

‘I heard it hiss. It's a snake.'

‘Be quiet!'

Gussie felt an icy shiver. It wasn't a snake. It hadn't hissed. The sound came from the feet of a heavy animal stepping through mud.

‘The bull!'

‘Sshhh!'

They couldn't see it, but it was there, somewhere, and Paul wanted the earth to open up and swallow him. That was how he had felt the night before. He wanted it to open up and swallow Miss Godwin, swallow them all from sight. He didn't even have the rifle. Twenty minutes he had spent, at daylight, hunting for the thing and then he had taken it to the shop and left it there. He was defenceless, and worse; he was burdened with Miss Godwin and two girls and Harvey. Worse than defenceless, because he couldn't even run. None of them could run, because lying within the rim of the table was Miss Godwin.

‘Where is it?' hissed Gussie.

‘Don't move. Don't breathe…'

It was there. Paul could see it, a misted form taking shape in the fog, squelching along the road.

‘Freeze,' whispered Paul.

It was the bull all right, mooching along the road, from the open end of the town towards the shop. It wasn't wild, it merely looked pathetic.

They froze, as Paul had said, not moving, scarcely breathing. They couldn't have done anything else, anyway. They were too terrified to have run. Harvey's face turned a dirty grey and he closed his eyes and couldn't look.

Paul moved his eyes, but nothing else. He seemed to turn to stone except for his eyes, and the bull came on, plod, plod, squelch, squelch, past them.

Maisie groaned faintly, and started trembling violently in every limb and joint, and the harder she tried to stop it the worse it became.

Paul could have screamed at her, but didn't dare open his mouth, didn't dare move, but he cast a glare on her that should have withered her up.

She couldn't stop it.

The bull moved on into the fog, lost its solidarity, became a shadow, and was gone.

Gussie collapsed in a heap, panting for breath, and Maisie whispered, ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

‘Quiet,' Paul whispered fiercely.

They waited, while Harvey's eyelids gradually parted and his eyes became larger and larger until Paul feared they were about to pop out of his head. They waited until the last sound had gone, until they could hear nothing but the throbbing silence and the strange and subdued rumble that was the river.

Paul sighed. ‘Righto. Relax…'

‘Oh dear!' groaned Gussie.

Paul's throat was dry and his tongue seemed to have swollen. Perhaps it had. Nothing in the world could surprise him now.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘Let's go.'

‘
That
way?' whined Maisie. ‘The bull went that way.'

Paul didn't like the idea either, but he said, ‘We can't stop here, and we can't go any other way. Can we?'

There was no answer to that except a brief shake from three frightened young heads.

They heaved the table up and set off, following the path of the bull. They had shuffled no more than twenty or thirty yards when a terrified scream almost startled them out of their wits. They actually dropped the table with fright. It was Frances.

 

Frances's problem was the water that Butch had so thoughtlessly used. Butch didn't understand that water was valuable. It was water to him whether it flowed in a river, lay in a ditch, or was conveniently located in a bucket. Butch didn't fully understand that flood waters stirred up the debris of years and were not safe to drink. They were usually safe enough to wash in, and the pool that Butch found for himself in the road was comparatively harmless even before he dutifully emptied into it his bottle of disinfectant. Thereafter any germs that survived deserved to survive.

Butch was always thorough and he stripped to his briefs and had a really good scrub, despite the bitter cold of the water. He didn't go near his clothes again. He left them yards from the pool, and it was a shame because they were the nice new clothes that had replaced his own ruined ones. He truly had made a mess of them. What on earth had possessed him? He must have gone silly for a while.

Butch was impressed enough by Frances's words to realize that the mud he stirred up in the pool didn't matter. Even if he transferred the mud to his body, as he did, it didn't matter, so long as he shifted the last remnant of his sausages. Butch was much more distressed by what he had done than Frances realized. Butch, deep inside, was a clean person. He might have seemed a little grubby to some people, but it was usually wholesome dirt. Butch could never eat food that anyone else had touched, could never share a sandwich or a piece of fruit. He had seen little children pick up apple cores and he had always snatched them away, and more than once had been scolded for it because others had believed he was stealing from babies. That he had actually handled bad meat offended him dreadfully, so much so that he still forgot the condition of his feet until he began to dry himself. They started hurting again, and that brought his thoughts sharply into the focus of his surroundings.

He looked up, still with the mud-stained towel in his hand, and there was Rickard's bull regarding him angrily, swaying its big head, snorting into the cold air two distinct puffs of vapour. It looked like the devil, complete with horns.

He started backing away from it, in horror, and had retreated only a few yards when he tumbled over a length of timber and fell heavily into wreckage of the hall. He let out a tiny cry and realized he was trapped. The wreckage was all around him except in the direction from which the bull was coming.

 

* * *

 

Frances had taken another bucket and had ventured into the fog to find clean water. She knew there shouldn't be any real difficulty because pure rain-water would lie in the hollows of buckled sheets of iron or even in storage tanks that had fallen but had not completely shattered. That anything would have done for the hot-water bottles did not for the moment occur to her. She was really too cross with Butch to think straight. Rather than have to plan for herself she desperately needed someone else to direct her, to tell her what to do. First and foremost Frances was a sturdy workhorse, not a leader.

The nearest wreckage was the hall, and it was amongst its tangle that Frances dragged her bucket, bailing water from where she found it a cupful at a time. It was slow work, because she was so impatient and so overwrought, and when she snagged the hem of her dress on a nail her annoyance was far out of proportion to the damage she had done. With very little trouble she could have freed the dress without harm, but she tugged on it irritably and ripped it.

The shock of what she had done pulled her up, made her try to steady down, but it wasn't as easy as that. Two days of privation and anxiety couldn't be dismissed in an instant. If a night's sleep couldn't cure it, a few seconds' pause couldn't touch it. The tensions had been building up, straining her nerves tighter and tighter, expanding towards breaking point. It was in that moment of conflict that she heard a faint cry, and she was so nervously alert that she knew its direction by instinct and her eyes were as quick as her ears. She actually saw Butch fall. She knew it was Butch because there was no one else in town so pink and so plump and so much the size of a man, and beyond, misted and vague, loomed the bull.

Frances broke. She gulped all the air it was possible for her lungs to contain and released it with a scream that expressed all her loneliness and all her helplessness and all her fear. She dropped the bucket with a clatter and lost the water on the ground. She ran away, because she couldn't bear to see Butch killed.

Butch could see death staring at him. Life had its problems for a fat boy of slow wits, but it had held no problem as big as this. Butch wanted to live more than anything else in the world. He never went looking for trouble as some people looked for it, but he wasn't a coward. Perhaps he was fighting to save only his own life, but he wouldn't die with his eyes closed. He heard the shriek from Frances, he had never heard anything like it, and that might have been the shock that moved him to face his peril.

The bull was pawing the ground and snorting and was as wild as a rhino, but Butch leapt from the debris into which he had fallen, wrenching free a length of jagged timber that normally he would have hesitated to handle. There were nails in it and it was splintered at one end to the sharpness of a spear, and it was fully eight feet long, four inches by two. It was a stud from the broken wall and a fearsome weapon, if he had the strength to use it.

Butch did have the strength and he never even wondered where it came from. He faced the bull, legs braced, fiercely glaring, breathing through open lips and clenched teeth, rapidly taking the feel of the piece of wood until it balanced above his right shoulder.

‘Please, Jesus,' he hissed. ‘I'm a good boy.'

He saw the bull coming, but didn't hear it. He heard nothing, not even his own shrill cry. He saw the beast so close that the beads of mist on its massive neck were glistening like jewels, and he heaved. He flung his piece of timber with all his might and with all the ferocity of his belief that Jesus wouldn't let him down, and immediately leapt to his right.

He landed on his knees, and heard the frightful crash as the bull ploughed, bellowing, into the wreckage of the hall. It was on its knees as he was, with the point of the spear embedded in its shoulders, but with six or seven feet of the shaft snapped off. More than that, it was fighting to free itself in its terrible rage, smashing timbers and plaster like eggshell.

Butch picked himself up to escape and Paul floundered into his vision, running like a madman. Paul was reeling, but he dragged Butch across the street towards the shop, groaning to frame his words, ‘Where's Frances, Frances, Frances?'

‘I dunno. Did anything happen to Frances?'

‘She screamed. Surely you heard?'

Butch shrugged. ‘Wasn't the bull. He was after me, not her. But I got him. I got him instead.'

Paul halted beside the shop, panting, ‘How do you mean—you got him?'

‘I speared him.'

Paul didn't argue, didn't exclaim his surprise, because it was true. He could see it was true in Butch's earnestness, and he could hear that it was true in the frightful sounds from the tormented bull.

‘Between the shoulders.' Butch smiled. ‘Like a matador.'

‘You stood up to that animal—alone?'

‘Not alone,' said Butch simply, ‘but with Jesus, like Mr Fiddler says.'

Paul was awed, because the bull, it seemed, had even ripped the clothes from Butch, even torn him with its horns. A great red weal, a foot long, was scorched across his back.

What could Paul say? He didn't really understand it any more than Butch did.

‘I'll get the rifle,' he mumbled, ‘and finish the brute off.'

Paul scrambled through the window, more dazed than purposeful, and saw the rifle lying on the counter, and suddenly saw something else beyond, that struck despair into his heart.

Fire was licking the wall of the shop and the old primus stove was issuing clouds of black smoke and flaring with an ugly flame three or four feet high. It had ignited a display card hanging overhead and spread to the top shelf. Glory be, the shop was on fire.

He screamed at the top of his voice, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!' and snatched from the floor two of the bags they had laid over the spilt honey, then hesitated, momentarily lost, overcome by the accumulation of troubles and frights and dangers.

Butch tumbled through the window opening behind him and provided Paul with the spur that he needed. He raced along the counter, suddenly aware of the serious risk of explosion. There were bottles of methylated spirits and turpentine, tins of kerosene and paints. There was enough stuff near the fire to blow the shop sky high. He slapped both bags over the stove and tried to smother it and yelled for the fire-extinguisher. Butch didn't know where it was and neither did Paul, and the bags failed to smother the stove.

‘More bags,' screamed Paul. ‘Call the others. We need help.'

And Paul started dithering, started panicking, and Butch was running in circles, not really knowing what he was looking for.

‘Bags, Butch! Bags!'

Butch grabbed them from the floor and floundered towards Paul, but by the time he got there Paul had changed his mind again and had decided to throw the stove outside. He held it at arm's length and ran to the window, trailing a frightening cloud of inflammable vapour through which the hungry fire leapt and cracked. He pitched it through the window as far as he could throw it, and it had scarcely left his hand before he saw the injured bull weaving through the fog, bellowing, tossing its head and writhing its shoulders in pain. It had smashed through the wreckage of the hall, and from one horn even trailed a bedraggled curtain.